In the acknowledgments to his book Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry, Adam Plunkett describes his relationship with his subject. He fell in love with Frost’s poems after being given a volume of them by his father at fifteen years old—a book that his father had been given by his father at the same age. But after encountering “the giants of Modernism and their aesthetic descendants” in college, Plunkett came to dismiss Frost’s poetry as “banal.” It was not, on his account, until one day in his office at the New Republic, where he worked as an editor, that Plunkett was struck by the complexity and sophistication of Frost’s poetry. That moment of insight, a mature return to the enthusiasms of childhood, evidently sparked Plunkett’s interest in writing an intellectual biography of Frost.
Like Plunkett, my own relationship with Frost had this tripartite structure. I remember loving “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” when I was younger. But I never took him entirely seriously until I took a graduate seminar on Frost and the notoriously difficult modernist poet Wallace Stevens. Despite Stevens’s obvious genius and the technicolor daring of his verse, Frost’s achievement seemed in some ways more impressive—his art and thought just as “modernist” as Stevens’s, concealed in language as lucid as the body of water in the poem “Spring Pools” (“These pools that, though in forests, still reflect / The total sky almost without defect…”).
Plunkett and I are in a long line of those who have been struck by Frost’s occult power as if by revelation. Frost’s “official” biographer, Lawrance Thompson, first encountered Frost as an undergraduate at Wesleyan University, when the poet came to read his work in the college chapel. This discovery of Frost’s poetry was, according to Plunkett, a “conversion experience” for Thompson, who attended a workshop Frost led at Wesleyan the next year. Thompson’s poem, entitled “Delusion,” was an object of ridicule for the other students. But Frost saw something in it. He won over the crowd to Thompson’s poem; he won over Thompson to himself.
Writing a biography of Robert Frost is necessarily an exercise in thinking through the philosophy of life writing. For one thing, questions of what can be known of another person’s (or one’s own) inner life, the relationship between concealment and self-disclosure, were major preoccupations of Frost’s poetry. Second, anyone who wants to write about Frost does so in Thompson’s shadow, Frost’s “biographer and his betrayer.” Despite his early adulation, Thompson’s three-volume biography of Frost was so damning that it destroyed the poet’s reputation for years. It also spawned a cottage industry of revisionist biographies that attempted to rehabilitate Frost’s character. Inevitably, anyone assessing Frost today writes with these ghosts at their back.
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Robert Frost was born in 1874 in San Francisco to an unstable and irascible father involved in the local Democratic Party machine and a lovely mother with a tendency to religious mysticism. Frost’s father died when he was eleven years old, at which point the family moved across the country to Lawrence, Massachusetts to be near his family. The key event of the young Frost’s life was meeting Elinor Miriam White at Lawrence High School in 1891. Elinor was studious and bright, co-valedictorian with Robert at their graduation. Frost fell in love, and after a somewhat turbulent courtship, the two were married in 1895. “Pretty nearly every one of my poems,” he later wrote, “will be found to be about her if rightly read.”
In his earlier years, Frost’s life could have come out of a picaresque novel. He trekked the eastern seaboard, he excelled at Harvard before dropping out, he tried his hand (mostly unsuccessfully) at husbandry and farming. Then he sailed off to England with his family to make it as a poet at almost forty years old. There he met two men who would become immensely significant for him: The first was the expatriate poet and impresario Ezra Pound, who championed Frost’s early work and got it a reception in the circles that mattered. The second was a talented and brooding Englishman named Edward Thomas. Thomas was a prose writer with the heart of a poet, and the two men established an intimacy that Frost would never know again with a male friend. Thomas was killed in France in 1917, after enlisting to fight in World War I. The poems he wrote under Frost’s influence established him as a major English poet in his own right after his death.
Frost’s trip to England indeed launched his career, but from then on his personal life was marked by a series of escalating losses. Elinor and Robert had already lost a three-year old son, Elliott, in 1900, the subject of one of Frost’s best poems, “Home Burial.” His adult daughter Marjorie died of illness in 1934. His son Carol shot and killed himself in 1940. Another daughter, Irma, was confined to an asylum in 1947, a victim of the insanity that was a Frost family inheritance. Frost’s greatest loss, and the one that brought out his own latent madness, was the death of Elinor in 1938. In the weeks, months and years that followed, Frost was subject to fits of rage and despondency, displaying occasionally unhinged behavior in public and derangement in private. In 1945, Frost “began a strange, unnatural chant and took an axe into his cabin, threatening to kill himself with it.” “Everyone is marked by his own craziness that he does not give way to,” Frost once said.
Plunkett’s study of Frost puts the poet’s relationship with grief and mourning at the forefront of both his life and his art. He beautifully describes Frost’s first collection, A Boy’s Will, as containing “a wide range of forms united by an invisible architecture of mourning.” To friends and readers, Frost often seemed defined by his keen sense of humor, the playfulness of his demeanor. But as he understood himself, “no matter how humorous I am I am sad. I am a jester about sorrow.”
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At the heart of Love and Need is an argument about the kind of poetry Frost wrote. Frost is often dismissed as a graduation-speech poet, the kind of writer whose lines are tailor-made for Hallmark cards and those unable to understand “difficult” poetry. Those arguing against this reception have traditionally done so by claiming, like the critic Lionel Trilling, that Frost is a “terrifying” poet whose pastoral exteriors conceal a bleak and nihilistic vision of existence. Refreshingly, Plunkett takes a different tack, moving beyond this reductive dualism. Plunkett establishes Frost’s seriousness as a poet not by playing up the (alleged) darkness and horror in the poetry’s content but by demonstrating the extent to which Frost’s seemingly simple poems absorbed and reworked the great mass of English poetry that had come before.
In the domain of modern poetry, the idea that artistic innovation relies on the knowledge and appropriation of tradition is associated not with Frost, but with a poet whom he considered his greatest rival: T.S. Eliot. Eliot’s formative essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” argued that “we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of [a poet’s] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.” Frost, repelled by Eliot’s ostentatious allusiveness, sought to distinguish himself by giving the impression that his poems were the products of spontaneous inspiration rather than archival remixing. He famously asserted that “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” came to him all at once complete. Plunkett’s concern, evident in his method and his argument, is to show that Frost was not being entirely truthful in this sort of claim. Just as much as Eliot, Frost wrote his poems in both unconscious and highly conscious conversation with the major English poets of the past. “The way to a poem is through as many as possible of all the other poems that were ever written,” Frost once wrote in a private notebook—a saying that now stands next to Eliot’s as one of the epigraphs to Plunkett’s book.
Plunkett’s close readings of several of Frost’s best poems brilliantly bring out the “hidden architecture” that underlies them all. The poems in A Boy’s Will, he shows, correspond numerically to their respective cantos in Tennyson’s In Memoriam, a favorite poem of Frost’s and one he turned to whenever his light was low. The playful lyric “Bond and Free,” which counterposes the power of “Thought” to that of “Love,” turns out to revolve around an occluded connection between “Thought” and Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost. Frost channeled Milton again in “Birches,” on the surface a nostalgic poem about a boy climbing a tree, but in its structural analogies to “Lycidas” revealed to be a pastoral lament. Or take one of Frost’s best-loved poems, “Hyla Brook,” about frogs disappearing from a dried-up brook:
By June our brook’s run out of song and speed.
Sought for much after that, it will be found
Either to have gone groping underground
(And taken with it all the Hyla breed
That shouted in the mist a month ago,
Like ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow)—
Or flourished and come up in jewel-weed,
Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent
Even against the way its waters went.
Its bed is left a faded paper sheet
Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat—
A brook to none but who remember long.
This as it will be seen is other far
Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song.
We love the things we love for what they are.
Compared to an Eliot poem, “Hyla Brook” seems unstudied and casual, straightforward in its ending declaration which might even seem cliché. In Plunkett’s hands, though, the veneer of spontaneity and simplicity scratches off to reveal a highly crafted reimagining of an older, seemingly totally different poem: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In Coleridge’s narrative poem, the mariner, who has been cursed after shooting an albatross, becomes stranded “in the land of mist and snow” (Frost’s “That shouted in the mist a month ago, / Like ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow”). Then the mariner’s crew, who die in the disaster he has precipitated, are taken over by ghosts that make “A noise like of a hidden brook / In the leafy month of June” (“By June our brook’s run out of song and speed”). Finally, Coleridge’s poem ends with a similarly aphoristic rhyme: “He prayeth best, who loveth best / All things both great and small; / For the dear God who loveth us, / He made and loveth all” (“We love the things we love for what they are”).
The point is not just that Frost borrowed key words and images from Coleridge. Rather, Plunkett shows, it is difficult to understand the meaning of a poem like “Hyla Brook” without knowing its occluded interlocutor. In “The Ancient Mariner,” the speaker “is left to wonder what continuity there is” between the ghosts on his ship and the crew he knew in life, which leads to his affirmation “about constancy in love regardless of the scale of the beloved.” Likewise, though Frost’s ghosts are frogs and water rather than men, the Coleridgean source reveals the grandeur and moral seriousness of the theme that underlies the mundane images. As Plunkett puts it, Frost’s best poetry was able “to repurpose the pith of different works across authors, genres, and centuries to make something substantially new, so new in most cases that its structural influences would be hidden from almost the whole of his readership.”
On Plunkett’s account, what so bothered Frost about Eliot was that the latter poet paraded in the most obvious way the same technique that Frost had honed and hidden. Both men grew up on Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, the most influential anthology of English poetry in that or any era, and both repurposed the collection’s music to create a new poetic language. But “Frost guarded his borrowings jealously,” Plunkett notes. “He was private about his associations with ghosts and how much of his writing grew out of it. He never admitted that he felt so threatened by Eliot’s theory of influence because of the extent to which it might expose influences Frost had consistently hidden, not least in the same principal source from which Eliot borrowed so liberally”—the Golden Treasury, the heritage of Shakespeare and Marlowe, Wordsworth and Keats.
But the learned substrata of Frost’s poems are not the final word. Plunkett discusses two readings of Frost’s best-known poem, “The Road Not Taken,” one of which he terms the “earnest” interpretation and the other the “ironic” one. In the former, the poem reads as a testament to the bravery of nonconformism, of taking the road “less traveled.” In the latter, the poetic voice’s hesitations, doubts and qualifications suggest that the poem concerns the way we construct meaningful narratives in retrospect to fit what were, at the time, arbitrary decisions. The temptation of the scholarly reader of Frost is to deride the naïve readings of his poetry in favor of the erudite, often darker, visions that lie beneath the surface. But as Plunkett rightly notes, that is just as much a mistake as taking the poems at face value. In the case of “The Road Not Taken,” he writes, “you’d have to read the poem with the dispassionate suspicion of a pedant not to feel the epiphany rise out of the lines.”
The point, then, is not to say that one must have a Ph.D in English literature to understand a Frost poem—a notion the poet himself, who never graduated from college, would have despised. But for readers—like Plunkett and myself—versed in the canons of modernism, for whom writers that are not “difficult” may seem less “important,” learning just how deeply Frost was immersed in the English poetic tradition can, paradoxically, help us to recover the enchantment of our earliest encounters with the poems. By holding the picture-perfect surfaces and the muddy depths in stereo vision, as it were, we can at the same time appreciate the verses’ complexities and feel their magic.
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One of the key questions of life writing—perhaps of life—is the extent to which a person can be summed up by any one particular moment. Aristotle took seriously the possibility that no one could be considered happy until (and indeed, even after) they died, because no matter how successful and virtuous one had been in their youth, a disgraced and painful old age could ruin the whole venture. But then, why should the misfortune or misbehavior of one day, one year, one stage of life, invalidate the goodness of another? And does what comes last necessarily hold more importance than what comes first?
These are questions that, as Plunkett demonstrates, are especially pertinent in an examination of Frost. The second half of Frost’s life was defined by public fame and private obsession—obsession with his amanuensis and personal assistant, the married Kay Morrison, over two decades Frost’s junior. The elder Frost was often prickly and self-loathing, and was known to boast about his sexual conquest of Kay; a physical intimacy which Morrison herself always staunchly denied. Worse yet, in Plunkett’s view, the poetry that made Frost America’s most beloved poet began to decline in quality. With the exception of a few later gems, Frost’s “poetry all but died with Elinor.”
The earlier Frost had been a family man, a generous teacher, a true friend, a devoted husband and a brilliant artist who understood the inner lives of working people better than almost any other poet of his day. The later Frost (Plunkett believes) was angry, depressive, dependent, overbearing and, at least most of the time, going through the motions with his poems. All this leads Plunkett to ask: “This later Frost, who has had an incalculable influence on the Frost whom posterity remembers—this storyteller driven in the early years after his wife’s death to extremes of grief and self-laceration and even to the edge of madness in the impression of people close to him—to what extent was the Frost who emerged in his later reflections and relationships a distortion of who he had been and to what extent a revelation of what he always thought was true?”
Lawrance Thompson had one answer to this question. As Plunkett points out, Thompson, despite meeting Frost as a youth, only got to know the elder poet after Elinor’s death, when Frost in the frenzy of his sorrow would often exaggeratedly blame himself for his family’s woes. Thompson took Frost at his word and, as his own relationship with Frost curdled from idolatry to disillusionment and then resentment, portrayed Frost as cruel and pathological.
Plunkett has a more generous view. He acknowledges the late Frost’s foibles, though notes the extent to which Frost’s behavior was a response to suffering that would have crushed most other people. More than that, he embeds his account of Frost in an understanding of the cosmic framework that shaped the sense Frost made of his own life in all its heights and troughs. Plunkett’s book, perhaps better than any other on Frost, illuminates the theological and spiritual core of Frost’s thought and art, carefully charting his move beyond the Emersonian mysticism of his mother to an earthier and more ambivalent spirituality.
Thompson once told Frost that he had “a tendency to play hide-and-seek around a half-truth.” This is emblematic not only of Frost’s poems, but of his theology. Frost was, philosophically, a dualist rather than a monist. He believed that the world was composed of matter on the one hand and spirit on the other. But Frost’s definition of spirit was neither systematic nor separate from human experience. As Plunkett writes, “Where Emerson’s conception of spirit is Platonic, a transcendent essence, Frost’s is Aristotelian in a general sense, realized in the natural world and gradually apprehended by careful observation of one’s inner and outer worlds.” In other words, for Frost, spirit and matter were intertwined in the world, brute fact and transcendent values and ideals inextricable from each other. What might look from one point of view like a revelation of God could look from another like nothing more than the petal of a flower or a ripple on water. As Frost put it in his poem “For Once, Then, Something,” “What was that whiteness? / Truth? A pebble of quartz?”
Frost’s dualism and suspicion of systematic theology meant that for him, “spirit had … to be inferred under conditions of uncertainty.” All of Frost’s mature poetry moves toward transcendence only to be pulled back to earth. Neither pole has precedence. Like the boy discovers who climbs up the white birch in “Birches” only to dip gracefully back to the ground, it is “good both going and coming back” because, despite the appeal of the empyrean, “Earth’s the right place for love.”
Frost’s religiosity is part of what alienated Thompson, a minister’s son who rejected the faith of his fathers. Thompson thought “Frost’s evasiveness owed itself to the vanity of not being wrong and the convenience of ambiguity. He did not consider the other interpretation, likewise plausible, that Frost out of reverence for a truth he did not think he could understand systematically would see reticence as a point of integrity in avoiding the unearned clarity of dogma.” Indeed, without an awareness of the “radically religious” component of Frost’s thought, the frequent misdirections of his poems might seem like mere obfuscation. But they were and they were not. Plunkett notes that Frost’s famous couplet, “It takes all sorts of in and outdoor schooling / To get adjusted to my kind of fooling,” was originally written from God’s perspective. Frost’s “fooling,” therefore, was not irreverent, but a way to understand a divine presence only revealed partially and always within the textures of the everyday world.
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Perhaps Plunkett dwells too much on the twists and turns of the psychodrama that developed between Frost, Kay, her husband Ted and Thompson. Much attention, perhaps more than necessary, is devoted to the question of whether Frost really did sleep with Kay (Plunkett thinks probably not). And short shrift is given in the second half of the book to the close readings of the poems that so distinguished the first half. Late masterpieces of Frost’s like “Directive,” or poems that get to the beating heart of his credo, like “Kitty Hawk,” are given glancing mention rather than sustained explication.
Nevertheless, Love and Need is the best introduction to Frost available, and a tonic even for those of us who already long ago chose to follow Frost into “those dark trees, / So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze.” Plunkett refuses the easy explanatory tools of psychology that Thompson, a student of Freud and Karen Horney, had availed himself of in favor of the tough-minded but generous idealism that Frost himself so wonderfully exemplified. Thompson saw Frost’s faults as a product of unresolved childhood trauma, the signs of untreated mental illness, while Frost saw his shortcomings as primarily moral, matter gaining the upper hand on spirit, the failure to live up to the high ideals that humans were put on earth to instantiate. As one of Frost’s confidantes, Roberta Chalmers, wrote to Thompson after he published the first volume of his biography, “You believe that to conceive of this life as a journey toward personal victory over his special faults—each man a prince—is insanity, perhaps inherited from one’s mother’s insanity. I can only say that I’ve never known ANYONE who ‘hungered & thirsted after righteousness’ so much as R.F. For this much hunger, we could forgive him all.” Plunkett, meanwhile, contends that “the best definition of Frost’s character ever attempted” was that of Frost’s dearest friend Edward Thomas: “the beauty of life seen by one in whom mystery and tenderness together just outstrip humour and curiosity.”
In the acknowledgments to his book Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry, Adam Plunkett describes his relationship with his subject. He fell in love with Frost’s poems after being given a volume of them by his father at fifteen years old—a book that his father had been given by his father at the same age. But after encountering “the giants of Modernism and their aesthetic descendants” in college, Plunkett came to dismiss Frost’s poetry as “banal.” It was not, on his account, until one day in his office at the New Republic, where he worked as an editor, that Plunkett was struck by the complexity and sophistication of Frost’s poetry. That moment of insight, a mature return to the enthusiasms of childhood, evidently sparked Plunkett’s interest in writing an intellectual biography of Frost.
Like Plunkett, my own relationship with Frost had this tripartite structure. I remember loving “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” when I was younger. But I never took him entirely seriously until I took a graduate seminar on Frost and the notoriously difficult modernist poet Wallace Stevens. Despite Stevens’s obvious genius and the technicolor daring of his verse, Frost’s achievement seemed in some ways more impressive—his art and thought just as “modernist” as Stevens’s, concealed in language as lucid as the body of water in the poem “Spring Pools” (“These pools that, though in forests, still reflect / The total sky almost without defect…”).
Plunkett and I are in a long line of those who have been struck by Frost’s occult power as if by revelation. Frost’s “official” biographer, Lawrance Thompson, first encountered Frost as an undergraduate at Wesleyan University, when the poet came to read his work in the college chapel. This discovery of Frost’s poetry was, according to Plunkett, a “conversion experience” for Thompson, who attended a workshop Frost led at Wesleyan the next year. Thompson’s poem, entitled “Delusion,” was an object of ridicule for the other students. But Frost saw something in it. He won over the crowd to Thompson’s poem; he won over Thompson to himself.
Writing a biography of Robert Frost is necessarily an exercise in thinking through the philosophy of life writing. For one thing, questions of what can be known of another person’s (or one’s own) inner life, the relationship between concealment and self-disclosure, were major preoccupations of Frost’s poetry. Second, anyone who wants to write about Frost does so in Thompson’s shadow, Frost’s “biographer and his betrayer.” Despite his early adulation, Thompson’s three-volume biography of Frost was so damning that it destroyed the poet’s reputation for years. It also spawned a cottage industry of revisionist biographies that attempted to rehabilitate Frost’s character. Inevitably, anyone assessing Frost today writes with these ghosts at their back.
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Robert Frost was born in 1874 in San Francisco to an unstable and irascible father involved in the local Democratic Party machine and a lovely mother with a tendency to religious mysticism. Frost’s father died when he was eleven years old, at which point the family moved across the country to Lawrence, Massachusetts to be near his family. The key event of the young Frost’s life was meeting Elinor Miriam White at Lawrence High School in 1891. Elinor was studious and bright, co-valedictorian with Robert at their graduation. Frost fell in love, and after a somewhat turbulent courtship, the two were married in 1895. “Pretty nearly every one of my poems,” he later wrote, “will be found to be about her if rightly read.”
In his earlier years, Frost’s life could have come out of a picaresque novel. He trekked the eastern seaboard, he excelled at Harvard before dropping out, he tried his hand (mostly unsuccessfully) at husbandry and farming. Then he sailed off to England with his family to make it as a poet at almost forty years old. There he met two men who would become immensely significant for him: The first was the expatriate poet and impresario Ezra Pound, who championed Frost’s early work and got it a reception in the circles that mattered. The second was a talented and brooding Englishman named Edward Thomas. Thomas was a prose writer with the heart of a poet, and the two men established an intimacy that Frost would never know again with a male friend. Thomas was killed in France in 1917, after enlisting to fight in World War I. The poems he wrote under Frost’s influence established him as a major English poet in his own right after his death.
Frost’s trip to England indeed launched his career, but from then on his personal life was marked by a series of escalating losses. Elinor and Robert had already lost a three-year old son, Elliott, in 1900, the subject of one of Frost’s best poems, “Home Burial.” His adult daughter Marjorie died of illness in 1934. His son Carol shot and killed himself in 1940. Another daughter, Irma, was confined to an asylum in 1947, a victim of the insanity that was a Frost family inheritance. Frost’s greatest loss, and the one that brought out his own latent madness, was the death of Elinor in 1938. In the weeks, months and years that followed, Frost was subject to fits of rage and despondency, displaying occasionally unhinged behavior in public and derangement in private. In 1945, Frost “began a strange, unnatural chant and took an axe into his cabin, threatening to kill himself with it.” “Everyone is marked by his own craziness that he does not give way to,” Frost once said.
Plunkett’s study of Frost puts the poet’s relationship with grief and mourning at the forefront of both his life and his art. He beautifully describes Frost’s first collection, A Boy’s Will, as containing “a wide range of forms united by an invisible architecture of mourning.” To friends and readers, Frost often seemed defined by his keen sense of humor, the playfulness of his demeanor. But as he understood himself, “no matter how humorous I am I am sad. I am a jester about sorrow.”
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At the heart of Love and Need is an argument about the kind of poetry Frost wrote. Frost is often dismissed as a graduation-speech poet, the kind of writer whose lines are tailor-made for Hallmark cards and those unable to understand “difficult” poetry. Those arguing against this reception have traditionally done so by claiming, like the critic Lionel Trilling, that Frost is a “terrifying” poet whose pastoral exteriors conceal a bleak and nihilistic vision of existence. Refreshingly, Plunkett takes a different tack, moving beyond this reductive dualism. Plunkett establishes Frost’s seriousness as a poet not by playing up the (alleged) darkness and horror in the poetry’s content but by demonstrating the extent to which Frost’s seemingly simple poems absorbed and reworked the great mass of English poetry that had come before.
In the domain of modern poetry, the idea that artistic innovation relies on the knowledge and appropriation of tradition is associated not with Frost, but with a poet whom he considered his greatest rival: T.S. Eliot. Eliot’s formative essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” argued that “we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of [a poet’s] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.” Frost, repelled by Eliot’s ostentatious allusiveness, sought to distinguish himself by giving the impression that his poems were the products of spontaneous inspiration rather than archival remixing. He famously asserted that “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” came to him all at once complete. Plunkett’s concern, evident in his method and his argument, is to show that Frost was not being entirely truthful in this sort of claim. Just as much as Eliot, Frost wrote his poems in both unconscious and highly conscious conversation with the major English poets of the past. “The way to a poem is through as many as possible of all the other poems that were ever written,” Frost once wrote in a private notebook—a saying that now stands next to Eliot’s as one of the epigraphs to Plunkett’s book.
Plunkett’s close readings of several of Frost’s best poems brilliantly bring out the “hidden architecture” that underlies them all. The poems in A Boy’s Will, he shows, correspond numerically to their respective cantos in Tennyson’s In Memoriam, a favorite poem of Frost’s and one he turned to whenever his light was low. The playful lyric “Bond and Free,” which counterposes the power of “Thought” to that of “Love,” turns out to revolve around an occluded connection between “Thought” and Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost. Frost channeled Milton again in “Birches,” on the surface a nostalgic poem about a boy climbing a tree, but in its structural analogies to “Lycidas” revealed to be a pastoral lament. Or take one of Frost’s best-loved poems, “Hyla Brook,” about frogs disappearing from a dried-up brook:
Compared to an Eliot poem, “Hyla Brook” seems unstudied and casual, straightforward in its ending declaration which might even seem cliché. In Plunkett’s hands, though, the veneer of spontaneity and simplicity scratches off to reveal a highly crafted reimagining of an older, seemingly totally different poem: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In Coleridge’s narrative poem, the mariner, who has been cursed after shooting an albatross, becomes stranded “in the land of mist and snow” (Frost’s “That shouted in the mist a month ago, / Like ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow”). Then the mariner’s crew, who die in the disaster he has precipitated, are taken over by ghosts that make “A noise like of a hidden brook / In the leafy month of June” (“By June our brook’s run out of song and speed”). Finally, Coleridge’s poem ends with a similarly aphoristic rhyme: “He prayeth best, who loveth best / All things both great and small; / For the dear God who loveth us, / He made and loveth all” (“We love the things we love for what they are”).
The point is not just that Frost borrowed key words and images from Coleridge. Rather, Plunkett shows, it is difficult to understand the meaning of a poem like “Hyla Brook” without knowing its occluded interlocutor. In “The Ancient Mariner,” the speaker “is left to wonder what continuity there is” between the ghosts on his ship and the crew he knew in life, which leads to his affirmation “about constancy in love regardless of the scale of the beloved.” Likewise, though Frost’s ghosts are frogs and water rather than men, the Coleridgean source reveals the grandeur and moral seriousness of the theme that underlies the mundane images. As Plunkett puts it, Frost’s best poetry was able “to repurpose the pith of different works across authors, genres, and centuries to make something substantially new, so new in most cases that its structural influences would be hidden from almost the whole of his readership.”
On Plunkett’s account, what so bothered Frost about Eliot was that the latter poet paraded in the most obvious way the same technique that Frost had honed and hidden. Both men grew up on Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, the most influential anthology of English poetry in that or any era, and both repurposed the collection’s music to create a new poetic language. But “Frost guarded his borrowings jealously,” Plunkett notes. “He was private about his associations with ghosts and how much of his writing grew out of it. He never admitted that he felt so threatened by Eliot’s theory of influence because of the extent to which it might expose influences Frost had consistently hidden, not least in the same principal source from which Eliot borrowed so liberally”—the Golden Treasury, the heritage of Shakespeare and Marlowe, Wordsworth and Keats.
But the learned substrata of Frost’s poems are not the final word. Plunkett discusses two readings of Frost’s best-known poem, “The Road Not Taken,” one of which he terms the “earnest” interpretation and the other the “ironic” one. In the former, the poem reads as a testament to the bravery of nonconformism, of taking the road “less traveled.” In the latter, the poetic voice’s hesitations, doubts and qualifications suggest that the poem concerns the way we construct meaningful narratives in retrospect to fit what were, at the time, arbitrary decisions. The temptation of the scholarly reader of Frost is to deride the naïve readings of his poetry in favor of the erudite, often darker, visions that lie beneath the surface. But as Plunkett rightly notes, that is just as much a mistake as taking the poems at face value. In the case of “The Road Not Taken,” he writes, “you’d have to read the poem with the dispassionate suspicion of a pedant not to feel the epiphany rise out of the lines.”
The point, then, is not to say that one must have a Ph.D in English literature to understand a Frost poem—a notion the poet himself, who never graduated from college, would have despised. But for readers—like Plunkett and myself—versed in the canons of modernism, for whom writers that are not “difficult” may seem less “important,” learning just how deeply Frost was immersed in the English poetic tradition can, paradoxically, help us to recover the enchantment of our earliest encounters with the poems. By holding the picture-perfect surfaces and the muddy depths in stereo vision, as it were, we can at the same time appreciate the verses’ complexities and feel their magic.
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One of the key questions of life writing—perhaps of life—is the extent to which a person can be summed up by any one particular moment. Aristotle took seriously the possibility that no one could be considered happy until (and indeed, even after) they died, because no matter how successful and virtuous one had been in their youth, a disgraced and painful old age could ruin the whole venture. But then, why should the misfortune or misbehavior of one day, one year, one stage of life, invalidate the goodness of another? And does what comes last necessarily hold more importance than what comes first?
These are questions that, as Plunkett demonstrates, are especially pertinent in an examination of Frost. The second half of Frost’s life was defined by public fame and private obsession—obsession with his amanuensis and personal assistant, the married Kay Morrison, over two decades Frost’s junior. The elder Frost was often prickly and self-loathing, and was known to boast about his sexual conquest of Kay; a physical intimacy which Morrison herself always staunchly denied. Worse yet, in Plunkett’s view, the poetry that made Frost America’s most beloved poet began to decline in quality. With the exception of a few later gems, Frost’s “poetry all but died with Elinor.”
The earlier Frost had been a family man, a generous teacher, a true friend, a devoted husband and a brilliant artist who understood the inner lives of working people better than almost any other poet of his day. The later Frost (Plunkett believes) was angry, depressive, dependent, overbearing and, at least most of the time, going through the motions with his poems. All this leads Plunkett to ask: “This later Frost, who has had an incalculable influence on the Frost whom posterity remembers—this storyteller driven in the early years after his wife’s death to extremes of grief and self-laceration and even to the edge of madness in the impression of people close to him—to what extent was the Frost who emerged in his later reflections and relationships a distortion of who he had been and to what extent a revelation of what he always thought was true?”
Lawrance Thompson had one answer to this question. As Plunkett points out, Thompson, despite meeting Frost as a youth, only got to know the elder poet after Elinor’s death, when Frost in the frenzy of his sorrow would often exaggeratedly blame himself for his family’s woes. Thompson took Frost at his word and, as his own relationship with Frost curdled from idolatry to disillusionment and then resentment, portrayed Frost as cruel and pathological.
Plunkett has a more generous view. He acknowledges the late Frost’s foibles, though notes the extent to which Frost’s behavior was a response to suffering that would have crushed most other people. More than that, he embeds his account of Frost in an understanding of the cosmic framework that shaped the sense Frost made of his own life in all its heights and troughs. Plunkett’s book, perhaps better than any other on Frost, illuminates the theological and spiritual core of Frost’s thought and art, carefully charting his move beyond the Emersonian mysticism of his mother to an earthier and more ambivalent spirituality.
Thompson once told Frost that he had “a tendency to play hide-and-seek around a half-truth.” This is emblematic not only of Frost’s poems, but of his theology. Frost was, philosophically, a dualist rather than a monist. He believed that the world was composed of matter on the one hand and spirit on the other. But Frost’s definition of spirit was neither systematic nor separate from human experience. As Plunkett writes, “Where Emerson’s conception of spirit is Platonic, a transcendent essence, Frost’s is Aristotelian in a general sense, realized in the natural world and gradually apprehended by careful observation of one’s inner and outer worlds.” In other words, for Frost, spirit and matter were intertwined in the world, brute fact and transcendent values and ideals inextricable from each other. What might look from one point of view like a revelation of God could look from another like nothing more than the petal of a flower or a ripple on water. As Frost put it in his poem “For Once, Then, Something,” “What was that whiteness? / Truth? A pebble of quartz?”
Frost’s dualism and suspicion of systematic theology meant that for him, “spirit had … to be inferred under conditions of uncertainty.” All of Frost’s mature poetry moves toward transcendence only to be pulled back to earth. Neither pole has precedence. Like the boy discovers who climbs up the white birch in “Birches” only to dip gracefully back to the ground, it is “good both going and coming back” because, despite the appeal of the empyrean, “Earth’s the right place for love.”
Frost’s religiosity is part of what alienated Thompson, a minister’s son who rejected the faith of his fathers. Thompson thought “Frost’s evasiveness owed itself to the vanity of not being wrong and the convenience of ambiguity. He did not consider the other interpretation, likewise plausible, that Frost out of reverence for a truth he did not think he could understand systematically would see reticence as a point of integrity in avoiding the unearned clarity of dogma.” Indeed, without an awareness of the “radically religious” component of Frost’s thought, the frequent misdirections of his poems might seem like mere obfuscation. But they were and they were not. Plunkett notes that Frost’s famous couplet, “It takes all sorts of in and outdoor schooling / To get adjusted to my kind of fooling,” was originally written from God’s perspective. Frost’s “fooling,” therefore, was not irreverent, but a way to understand a divine presence only revealed partially and always within the textures of the everyday world.
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Perhaps Plunkett dwells too much on the twists and turns of the psychodrama that developed between Frost, Kay, her husband Ted and Thompson. Much attention, perhaps more than necessary, is devoted to the question of whether Frost really did sleep with Kay (Plunkett thinks probably not). And short shrift is given in the second half of the book to the close readings of the poems that so distinguished the first half. Late masterpieces of Frost’s like “Directive,” or poems that get to the beating heart of his credo, like “Kitty Hawk,” are given glancing mention rather than sustained explication.
Nevertheless, Love and Need is the best introduction to Frost available, and a tonic even for those of us who already long ago chose to follow Frost into “those dark trees, / So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze.” Plunkett refuses the easy explanatory tools of psychology that Thompson, a student of Freud and Karen Horney, had availed himself of in favor of the tough-minded but generous idealism that Frost himself so wonderfully exemplified. Thompson saw Frost’s faults as a product of unresolved childhood trauma, the signs of untreated mental illness, while Frost saw his shortcomings as primarily moral, matter gaining the upper hand on spirit, the failure to live up to the high ideals that humans were put on earth to instantiate. As one of Frost’s confidantes, Roberta Chalmers, wrote to Thompson after he published the first volume of his biography, “You believe that to conceive of this life as a journey toward personal victory over his special faults—each man a prince—is insanity, perhaps inherited from one’s mother’s insanity. I can only say that I’ve never known ANYONE who ‘hungered & thirsted after righteousness’ so much as R.F. For this much hunger, we could forgive him all.” Plunkett, meanwhile, contends that “the best definition of Frost’s character ever attempted” was that of Frost’s dearest friend Edward Thomas: “the beauty of life seen by one in whom mystery and tenderness together just outstrip humour and curiosity.”
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.